Any PPS proxy pools?

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Are there any pools which offer PPS payments to miners, but don't generate work themselves, but rather forward work from another (non-PPS) pool?

This has the same relation to operating a normal pool, as joining a pool is to solo mining. If the backend pool is larger than the frontend pool, it significantly decreases the frontend's operator's variance, thus allowing him to safely offer low PPS fee.

This isn't very scalable (at least until there are larger fair pools), but can be a good bootstrapping option. It also works if the frontend and backend are operated by the same person, on the same server.

What are the technical challenges in implementing this?

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[Sukrim]

It's perfectly possible already now and I already planned to set up something like that myself - the only challenge is right now finding time to set up everything properly.

Challenges I can think of:
Risk of getting banned/blacklisted for "DDoS" by the pool
Background pool cannot serve getworks fast enough during peak times
Handwritten proxy might be not as optimized as some more sophisticated software out there (I even thought of just running bitHopper and relaying further from there...)
Scalability issues, especially bandwidth

[iopq]

I have one even better:
poolhop prop pools, payout "feeless" PPS, submit to SMPPS or similar as backup

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I have one even better:
poolhop prop pools, payout "feeless" PPS, submit to SMPPS or similar as backup

Yeah, that's another thing I've been thinking about for a while (even before Multipool did something similar), but
1. Why stop at feeless? You can offer above 100% PPS while still maintaining a large profit margin.
2. With enough proportional pools there's not much need for backup, but for a backup you'll probably want to use a hopping-proof pool rather than SMPPS.
3. This is of course more controversial than a non-hopping proxy.

[iopq]

I have one even better:
poolhop prop pools, payout "feeless" PPS, submit to SMPPS or similar as backup

Yeah, that's another thing I've been thinking about for a while (even before Multipool did something similar), but
1. Why stop at feeless? You can offer above 100% PPS while still maintaining a large profit margin.
2. With enough proportional pools there's not much need for backup, but for a backup you'll probably want to use a hopping-proof pool rather than SMPPS.
3. This is of course more controversial than a non-hopping proxy.

there are never enough prop pools unless you hop deepbit and others that are api-unfriendly using LP timings in which case you need to finetune the LP penalties depending on how good of a connection you have to a certain pool

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I have one even better:
poolhop prop pools, payout "feeless" PPS, submit to SMPPS or similar as backup

Yeah, that's another thing I've been thinking about for a while (even before Multipool did something similar), but
1. Why stop at feeless? You can offer above 100% PPS while still maintaining a large profit margin.
2. With enough proportional pools there's not much need for backup, but for a backup you'll probably want to use a hopping-proof pool rather than SMPPS.
3. This is of course more controversial than a non-hopping proxy.

there are never enough prop pools unless you hop deepbit and others that are api-unfriendly using LP timings in which case you need to finetune the LP penalties depending on how good of a connection you have to a certain pool

Hopping deepbit is easy. If a block is found in the network and you can't attribute it to any of the other pools, it's probably deepbit's. For even better results, calculate your efficiencies conditioning on the assumption that deepbit's last block is the last unknown block, that it is the 2nd last unknown block, the 3rd, and so on, and calculate the expected efficiency using the probability that an unknown block is deepbit's.